Ian Anderson tour revisits Jethro Tull classic

Published 4:58 pm, Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, seated, and his band will bring the Thick as a Brick 2 tour to the Mohegan Sun Arena on Thursday night, Oct. 4.

Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, seated, and his band will bring the Thick as a Brick 2 tour to the Mohegan Sun Arena on Thursday night, Oct. 4.

Photo: Contributed Photo

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Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, second from left, and his band will bring the Thick as a Brick 2 tour to the Mohegan Sun Arena on Thursday night, Oct. 4.

Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, second from left, and his band will bring the Thick as a Brick 2 tour to the Mohegan Sun Arena on Thursday night, Oct. 4.

Photo: Contributed Photo

Ian Anderson tour revisits Jethro Tull classic

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Jethro Tull's 1971 album "Aqualung" was often mistakenly referred to as a concept album, so frontman Ian Anderson decided to give the music press a concept album from his band. And in true Tull fashion, he went above and beyond.

"Thick as a Brick," released in 1972, was one 44-minute song and the lyrics were the creation of a fictional 8-year-old boy, Gerald Bostock.

Even the album's sleeve was over-the-top, featuring a newspaper, the St. Cleve Chronicle and Linwell Advertiser, telling of Gerald's controversial poem along with other stories (including a review of the album by Anderson, using a pseudonym).

Forty years later, Anderson has once again summoned the young poet for inspiration, releasing "Thick as a Brick 2," which imagines several scenarios that Gerald's life may have taken since his early fame.

"It was rising to a challenge, really," Anderson said in a recent phone interview from his home in England. "It's not something that I ever thought I would do, and, indeed, I steadfastly politely turned down suggestions to do just that over the years.

"It was only in 2010 that I thought there was a way that I could do it that would avoid a nostalgic looking back, but would really position the album in the present day.

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"So it was when I hit upon a concept that would allow me to make a 40-year-later sequel, rather than to make a what-happened-next kind of album."

In keeping with the times, the cover of the new record takes the form of a website, and Anderson again went the extra mile, setting up www.stcleve.com, the online home of the newspaper from the original.

At the site, there are plenty faux news items -- including a story about "ageing (sic) rock star" Ian Anderson -- and fans can submit items of their own for inclusion.

"There was a lot of stuff to do there, really, with a lot of the contemporary ways of presenting the record," Anderson said. "Not just as a physical product, as we did in the old days, but to present it as an online version with a website and all of the associated bits and pieces of social media as a further form of getting it out there to people."

Even with the extra effort, Anderson has no expectations that "TAAB2" will match its predecessor, in terms of sales or cultural impact.

"At the end of the day, it is a specialized and small market for progressive rock these days, although it seems to have had something of a rebirth in the last few years, particularly with a younger audience," he said.

"But it's not 1972, when the good-will element that was held over from the `Aqualung' album resulted in `Thick as a Brick,' a prog-rock album, being No. 1 on the Billboard charts.

"I think those days have almost certainly gone by, whether it be us or anyone else doing prog-rock, it's not really the stuff of which enormous commercial sales are made."

For the Thick as a Brick 2 album and tour -- which is not presented as a Jethro Tull project -- Anderson, 65, assembled a group of musicians he has worked with in the past, with the exception of Ryan O'Donnell, who is called on to ease some of the load during live performances.

The tour will feature both albums played in their entirety, something that was never done for the original.

"One of the problems we had with the original album that made it so difficult to play was that I was singing, playing flute and playing acoustic guitar, which is impossible to re-create on stage," Anderson said. "I only have two hands and one voice, so it's good having a man along to flesh out things and cover all the elements, particularly on the first album, where I do need an extra person to do those arrangements and parts that we did in 1972.

"It's not so difficult to play, but it's a lot to remember, a lot to try and focus on. Once you do a certain number of shows, it becomes a whole lot easier and we're well past that particular point where it started to become more fun.

"We're pretty well immersed in it now to sit back and enjoy some of the improv moments and the theatricality that makes it fun. We can all enjoy those things much more than we could the first few nights, when it was a bit scary."